Applicant and other related companies are in the business of distributing realtime financial market information to various clients who use this information to carry on their business. When a client subscribes for this service, an agreement is entered into in which the client indicates what information is desired and how many video screens will be displaying the information. Based on these parameters, a fee is assessed to the client and the information then is transmitted to the client.
Typically, this financial market information is transmitted to clients as one or more pages or records that may be displayed on a video screen, portions of which, from time to time, are updated to reflect changes in the market information. Various clients subscribe to view different specific groups of these pages and/or records.
An early method of distributing market information was based upon the transmission of a single page of real time digital information over a single telephone line. Page-oriented information (ROW #, COL #, CHARACTER STRING) was sent from the information vendor's computer over a telephone network to a controller, provided by the information vendor, located at the client site. The page-oriented information was subsequently converted to video by a video generation unit within the controller. The video output was then connected to a video screen by a single coaxial cable.
Each full page was repeatedly transmitted in video at a field rate for realtime display, similar to that of a television transmission. However, once the video signal was produced, there was nothing, except the personal integrity of the client, to prevent the client from connecting any number of video screens to a video distribution amplifier connected to the controller, driving a larger number of video screens above and beyond the number stated in the agreement. This practice dilutes the revenues to which the information vendor would ordinarily be entitled.
This architecture was costly and unreliable because of the large amount of hardware needed to place financial information on a large number of trading desks. For example, if a client's trading room had thirty traders, each trader needed his own single-user system resulting in thirty keyboards, thirty controllers with thirty internal video generation units, thirty telephone cables, thirty modems, thirty coaxial video cables, and thirty video screens to receive and display the required financial information.
This technology also limited the screen presentation format to what was provided by the information vendor. When traders were only interested in one or two fields of information on a screen, they would have to display the entire page of information. If they wanted to look at one or more fields of information on a second screen at the same time, an entire additional single-user system would be required. Further, when two traders wanted to look at the same page, they would either have to have two separate single-user systems or the video information would be redistributed to a "slave" video screen making it difficult for the information vendor to know how many video screens were connected to a given controller and hence how many people were viewing their information. This made billing difficult and usually created a process of surprise client-site visits that left both information vendor and client unhappy.
The development of multi-user systems reduced the amount of required hardware and enabled users to share resources and view common information. In multi-user systems, each trader had one keyboard and several video screens. Through the use of video switching techniques, thirty traders could share perhaps ten or fifteen controllers and contend for their use. Since many traders are part of a trading group that uses essentially the same financial market information, the probability of blocking (not having a controller available to fulfill a new page request) was small.
Such multi-user systems helped reduce costs by reducing the number of controllers, keyboards, and system cabling, but did not solve either the billing problems or allow the user to customize screen presentation formats.
Later, single telephone line, multi-page distribution systems were developed which reduced the required number of telephone lines. The information syntax for these multi-page sources was slightly modified to (PAGE #, ROW #, COL #, CHARACTER STRING). Users of such systems also could create composite pages (fields from different pages displayed simultaneously on one video screen) and calculate and insert additional value-added information (e.g., bond yield to maturity). By doing so, customized output display pages could be created showing only the information and value-added calculations the user wanted to see.
Users developing value-added applications based upon page oriented data had to assign a symbolic name to an information field located at a specific display location of the input source page. When the information vendor changed the presentation format of the information (i.e., the location of a specific data element), as often happens when financial instruments are either added or deleted, the value-added application had to be modified. To overcome this difficulty, and to supply basic information without display parameters, the information vendor created record-oriented sources using the syntax (SYMBOLIC NAME, CHARACTER STRING). Examples of such a system are the Reuters Integrated Data Network and the Telerate TIQ Feed.
Despite the foregoing advances in the field of electronic financial information distribution systems, current systems still allow video screens to be added and/or moved freely without either the information vendor's knowledge or consent. Further, each video screen must be connected by its own single-video "home-run" cable, i.e., a cable that typically runs for hundreds of feet between the trading floor where the video screen is located and the equipment room where either a controller, video switch output, or a host computer is located.